Hillary Clinton zings Trump over new voter conspiracy theory

Hillary Clinton swatted back at President Donald Trump’s attempts to spread another conspiracy related to her popular-vote victory in the 2016 presidential election, this time claiming it was due to a search engine manipulation.

“Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election!" Trump wrote Monday on Twitter. “This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought!”

While Trump did not cite the source of his claim, it came minutes after a segment on Fox Business Network referred to congressional testimony in July from behavioral psychologist Robert Epstein. In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Epstein claimed that based on his research, “biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.”

Epstein appears to have been citing a study based on a collection of tens of thousands of search engine results collected in the run-up to the 2016 election. The study analyzed a relatively small sample size: The results of 95 different voters, just 21 of whom he says were undecided. He based the results on a phenomenon he calls “Search Engine Manipulation Effect.” Google has denied Epstein’s claims.

Epstein also claimed in his congressional testimony that Big Tech, if left unchecked, could be able to shift as many as 15 million votes toward a particular candidate in the 2020 election. Trump appeared to have nudged that number higher in his tweet Monday.

But Clinton, whose popular vote margin totaled just below 3 million votes, was having none of Trump’s assertions.

“The debunked study you’re referring to was based on 21 undecided voters. For context that’s about half the number of people associated with your campaign who have been indicted,” she replied in a tweet. Clinton was likely referring to the six operatives with ties to Trump or his campaign who were swept up in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which ended earlier this year.

Since the 2016 election, the president has chafed at losing the popular vote to Clinton, repeatedly amplifying the baseless claim that millions of illegal ballots were cast for her. But Trump has also made tech giants like Google a frequent target, often claiming that tech companies censor conservative viewpoints to benefit Democrats.